


Chop

by ridorana



Series: the roots of santalum [2]
Category: Final Fantasy XII
Genre: Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-03
Updated: 2017-12-03
Packaged: 2019-02-10 05:33:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12905172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ridorana/pseuds/ridorana
Summary: "There's many a man has more hair than wit."





	Chop

It is, like everything about the visage of Ffamran Mied Bunansa, beautiful. Gleaming chestnut hair, bone-straight, falls long to curve around the arch of his shoulders, like water cascading to stone. In the right light, an admirer can catch the telltale honey undertones, flecked like gold from too many days of sneaking out into the sun when duty called for him in the scholar’s den. Archades holds fast to its tired tradition, tresses meticulously trimmed with a crisp part through the middle, but the young Bunansa wears it well among his peers. It is, after all, protocol for young noblemen to keep their hair long and loose and to preen it with care, but Ffamran does nothing by halves; if he must look like every other damn fop, he will do so with a grandeur that spikes envy and lust through the hearts of men and women alike.

Thankfully, with the gene pool playing its cards right and the competition tragically fumbling its hand, that isn’t a difficult endeavor. Ffamran has inherited his mother’s thick mane, all its softness and sheen, and the purity of his northern blood keeps the strands neat and in line. He is the pinnacle of noble vanity without ever having need to spend a gil on products that reek of pine-root and burn the scalp. And yet his cabinet is still lined from top to bottom with balms, sheen serums, sprays that keep every strand in place - and when the mornings call for him to don armor that’s too heavy and clunky for a silhouette such as his, the only thing that rouses him to start the day is to sit in front of his mirror and perform his ritual, vials in his cabinet serving as potions in this vain alchemy. If everyone else is going to walk around with lifeless flaccid mops sagging ‘round their heads the very least he can do is set a standard.

And does he ever.

In Archades, a man’s mane reflects their very valor for life and learning - neglect your hair, neglect your lineage. Neglect your lineage and, well, there’s room for you somewhere in the Lowers, surely. There’s always room in the Lowers.

\---

Tucked along a battered foot-street, there’s a bar in the Lowers that Ffamran frequents which serves, certainly, the worst ale he’s ever had - but it’s cold, and he drinks it slow so that time passes to keep him from the snakepit above. Within this _fine establishment_ , he abandons all rigid propriety bred into his person - apparent mostly by the indecorous hunch of his back over the bar and hood pulled over his head; it covers his hair, twisted back in a tie, and Ffamran hides in shadows.

A touch from behind him ghosts the knobs of his spine and Ffamran flinches, turns to bare his teeth  too-white for the Lowers, but it’s only Jules. Of course. Like anyone else in this part of town would have the audacity to outright touch him with their filthy hands as though he was loose gil.

“No need to keep that hood up, Master,” the streetear’s grin is a serpent's curl, bared fangs and words that drip with a venom similar in tune to that above. “If the quality of your garb doesn’t give your status away, your stench of sandalwood will.”

“I'd have thought the latrine that is this very hovel would have done well enough to purge me of my noble redolence,” Ffamran mutters. But Jules only laughs.

“Run down here all you like, Ffamran, but no amount of cavorting as a Vulgar will knock you off your blood-forged pedestal; pity has it, then, that you’ll never be anything less than what you are now.” And then he plucks the near-full pint glass from in front of Ffamran, and quaffs it long until it runs dry. Jules regards him, finding Ffamran’s eyes too easily in the shadow of his cloak. “You’re something, Bunansa. In all my days I've never met a man who wants to move down in the world.”

“Not down,” Ffamran counters capriciously. “More out.”

He knows a lot, this streetear, but of him, there’s still much to learn. He buys the gutter churl another pint when Jules asks, and does not miss the echo it left in his mouth as he watches the other drink as though it were sweetwater.

“Next time you’re down here, do your old friend a favor.” He’s only just met the Vulgar, not even a moon cycle ago, but Archades does not hold friends for long. “Bring me some o’ that hair oil you bathe yourself in, would you, Goldilocks? My mane’s drier than a bangaa cunt.” He scratches at it, and where dirt-clogged fingernails can hold no more grime it falls from his head like debris. Ffamran swallows his bile, though the gesture is not unfamiliar to him whether he is here or there.

\---

The Archadian gentry despise same-sex relations.

So, naturally, Ffamran does it every chance he gets.

Though he holds himself to a high standard of superficial luxuries, for the sake of spite he lessens them for certain bedmates. It’s not as though the picking pool is exactly generous with Archades’ disgust for these sorts of trysts.

And besides, everything that’s hard on the eyes turns easy in the dark.

Ffamran’s mouth is open and messy on this nameless Archadian as they claw at each other with a lack of grace that only comes to the young and hasty. Beneath him, Ffamran rolls his hips, and the friction makes him bite down on the other’s mouth. They go on like this, shifting and learning, and then Ffamran’s face is in the pillows and he bites into the plush down as he’s filled, inch by seething inch.

The man fucks him like an animal from behind and Ffamran goads him with a snarl and words he’s only ever thought, never said, until now when his throat is dry with the singe of them. He finds a twisted gratification in this display of debauchery, and moves with the thrusts until he doesn’t even care how much noise they’re making. Ffamran arches his back, and his partner rewards him with a slap on the ass - and he doesn’t mean to moan louder but he does.

“Like that, then, do you?” The man - what was his name again? - breathes from behind, and does it twice, three times. Ffamran is not the generous type but he gives the man another moan, because he likes the sound of his own voice and the acoustics in this room prove nice enough. With a ripple of his jaw Ffamran takes the man splitting him wide and good, and for a moment he loses himself in the rhythm before, all too soon, he's brought back to reality when the hand carding roughly through his hair tightens into a fist and _pulls_. Ffamran snaps his head from the pillows with the force, the curve of his neck bared to the ceiling, and the moan that tumbles out again is not one of show but of earnest that takes them both by surprise.

"Again," Ffamran demands, and the fingers rake against his scalp to tug him taut with the man’s thrusts. They go on like this until the pain, blossoming like a crown of fire, brands Ffamran like a steed - reins and all - and he comes without a sound, his throat raw and barren.

\---

It is easy to walk with a chin held skyward when one is as beautiful as he. Though Ffamran grows tired of the inevitable staleness in Archades' predictable machinations, at least he can cause a clamor in the streets with his very presence. It's good to parade around every now and again and remind the nobility of a standard they only wish to attain. Too oft, he thinks, do the gentry live in a stagnant comfort in believing they have everything; it's refreshing to want. So he does them this favor, ambling throughout the streets either when his studies are finished or when he decides they are, and he soaks in their gazes as he passes, knowing full well the envy his silken tresses ignite within men with mops for hair and last season's brocade.

Ffamran has little qualms about his show of peacockery. Modesty is no form of currency in any city _he's_ visited, especially not this one. If he can garner this much attention from a simple late-afternoon stroll, imagine what he could do if he gave a damn.

He is, truth be told, terribly bored.

But an audience is a lovely thing, and though he has nowhere to go, he can forge a purpose in whatever door he opens on a whim. It's certainly more entertaining than staying cooped up in his bedchambers, ostentatious though they are. Spying on the gentry with his looking glass from his veranda stopped being fun when Lady Avon finally divorced her two-timing husband, who was sleeping with some Molberry tramp (and _who_ , Ffamran wonders, sent her _that_ anonymous tip? What a mystery - certainly someone looking to cause a stir! Heavens be.)

As he stops on a footbridge stretched over he whir of aircabs below, he leans over the railing and indulges in a terrible little compulsion; his ringed fingers lock onto a stray section of hair flitting about in the wake of a speeding cab’s flight, and he twirls it amongst his fingers, a gentle twist of his wrist until the lock curls around the digit snugly. He keeps it there, coiled around his finger, and he pulls it taut until he feels the strain of blood beneath flesh protesting its barricade.

Ffamran holds it there until his ring finger swells, and when he releases it the spiral relents, unwinding sinuously through his touch like the finest of silks.

Shameful habit, that, but his fingers itch to card through his own hair as of late to pull and test; it soothes an itch he did not know he had, an ache he cannot name.

His stomach growls, suddenly, and he snorts - that ache is at least one he can name, and it is about time for supper. Very well - he’s flaunted enough for today and it certainly works up an appetite.

In the cobbled streets of Trant, shadowed in the late-day sun, Ffamran breathes in the first signs of autumn's chill air. Above, his eyes follow a flock of wayward birds making their restless rounds in the sky, and the hard slant of the dying sun ignites the underside of their wings in a gilded shimmer as they weave through ruby skyscrapers. He halts mid-step to watch them with a looseness in his jaw that his father would deem unbecoming, until his neck cranes with the strain and he's certain he looks like a sky-addled moogle.

Ffamran truly is awestruck by their beauty and the image burns itself into the backs of his eyelids later, when he cannot find sleep and all he can see is wings and sky and gold.

It is, indeed, refreshing to want.

\---

Ffamran, in a spiral of rage and mortification, stomps up the stairs from the Lowers as the morning bells ring their final chimes. So it's true, then - Jules sold his information out and now his father faces a suspension. Any other circumstance and Cid being thrown from his obsession at Draklor would be cause for a celebration, but all Ffamran can feel is a cold anger roiling through his veins. He seethes under the midmorning sun, the only cloud in the sky being the storm above his head. Only when he passes a shop window does he smooth down the muss of his bedhead he didn't bother to preen before tearing into the Lowers earlier.

There are wayward knots that he combs out with his fingers, and both the snap and pull make him wince. With one final smoothing motion by the palm of his hand, he straightens his shoulders and takes in a long breath through his nose.

He should be at the Akademy by now, but he's too riled to do anything but walk until his feet hurt. He can't go home, either, as Cid is mad as a bat throwing dinner plates at the wall and yelling to that _imaginary friend_ he adopted in Jagd. And he can't return to the Lowers, though that is hardly a loss - damn Jules to hell, damn everyone in this snakepit to hell. Uppers, Lowers… it doesn’t matter if a man's a sniveling droll pecking at carcasses for a scrap of information or if he's nobility already-reeking of sandalwood; it's all about going higher, higher, and higher here.

The clench of his jaw and the red ire filming over his vision make it hard enough for Ffamran to discern a place and a purpose for his feet to lead him. He tears through the streets headed nowhere in particular until he comes to.

The aerodrome's walls reach towards the sky and Ffamran pauses for but a moment.

He considers - for now, he has the whole day ahead of him. Two or more, even, if Cid is as inattentive as he's been of late. No one would miss him.

Ffamran steps inside, and buys a ticket.

\---

He's been here before, as a boy with his mother and father, but he can remember very little about Bhujerba aside from a prying dizziness, shortness of breath, and strange, hollow-looking children asking him about his hat.

He wonders, as he ambles through the cobbled streets lined with ivy's gnarling verdure, why he doesn’t frequent the sky continent of Dorstonis more often. There is a lightness in his steps that is evidence enough his trip away from Archades' ruby entombment has done wonders for his mood, and under the sun, Ffamran looks skyward again.

There’s a leisure stretch of hours ahead of him until nightfall, so he wanders into a weapons shop. Through crisp glass, Ffamran admires the preserved Bhujerban armors on display, and he shifts along the array of metals and leathers before stopping in his tracks at a grand encasement of guns.

A guilty sort of pleasure he garners from firearms has Ffamran nearly drooling on the floor, and a shopkeep, sensing his interest but moreso the weight of his coinpouch, unlocks it for him.

He's running his hands along the silver of a handsome blunderbuss and its oaky sheen when the shopkeep chimes,

"Heading to fight the _raksas_?"

Ffamran rears back as though he's been insulted. "The what?"

"The fiends, _bhadra_ ," and he doesn't want to know what that means either. "A hunter, are you?"

Ffamran blinks and considers the question. "Not a hunter, but a sure shot nonetheless.” And it’s true, that - firearms are frowned upon in the traditions of Archades’ military lest equipped to a fleetship, it would seem, but Ffamran holds a fascination and a knack for them nonetheless.

"Head down to the mines. They could use your help."

Serendipity is not common in Archades. The notion strikes him, and Ffamran leaves the shop, the new gun slung over his back and a pouch of shot at his side.

\---

He's seated comfortably in a bar he does not know the name of when night blankets Bhujerba. Ffamran pleasantly discovers that Madhu tastes far better in its country of origin than from its import to Archades; it must be freshly brewed, as the cinnamon is vibrant on his tongue and the spices are alive, illuminating his palate.

With his gun still pressed to a slant across his spine, Ffamran reflects on his day of shooting in the mines. There’s a fond ache in his wrist from the recoil, one he hasn’t felt in a while - training at the Akademy has given him little time to indulge in the shooting range. Though it was a costly purchase, he’s happy with it, and blasting through bats and skeletons alike was a perfect remedy to dissolve his ire born from just this morning.

It is not custom for one to flaunt their weaponry about in Archades, but here the people wear it upon their person with no qualms; Ffamran welcomes the weight the _Rigel_ pressed against him. There is an odd comfort in it, and it's a handsome gun to boot. He's happy to show it off.

The din of the tavern is a welcome sound, a collage of bangaa, seeq, hume and moogle alike. He doesn't don the role of anonymity often, as he revels in the spotlight, but here he trades it out with no qualms.This sort of cultural vibrancy is not so easily found in Archades, and Ffamran - having read much of the world but seen little in his years - soaks it up like a stone in the sun.

He has barely been here twelve hours and already his sour mood feels as far away as Archades itself.

 _Archades_ \- a wretched place with walls that close in on him year after year, until its towers clog the sky and shadows hide the sun. Training at the Akademy is no fate he ever dreamt of, and the ceremony to indoctrinate him into being a Judge comes nigh. He laughs, a puff of warm air into the quickly-emptying cup at his lips. There _is_ something gratifying about shirking his lessons so close to the ceremony. He closes his eyes and grins something self-satisfactory; this impromptu little trip has been fun so far.

Behind the curtain of his eyelids, he still sees the singe of blue ore-glow from the mines earlier today, magicite gleaming like moonstones and warming his palm when he grazed the cavern walls. There is a thrum that still echoes in his chest when he thinks back to the mine’s innards. The power concentrated there keeps this very continent afloat so high that birds cannot reach it.

If man can live above the birds, how much higher can they go before the sun melts their wings?

His thoughts wander to Cid: his natterings about nethecite, the madness that plagues him, and the recent trip to Jagd that played catalyst to this culmination of a father estranged. Ffamran still has no answers. And truth be told, he doesn’t want them. What he _wants_ is his father back, what he _wants_ is not a life at the beck and call of the Empire like a dog on a leash. 

 _This_ breed of want is not refreshing - it is stale and pulls at the corners of Ffamran’s mouth until a moue of distaste darkens his features. 

Today has been short, but it’s just a small sampling of a life free of the Empire; already Ffamran feels as though he’s learned more about what lies outside of Archades than any book could ever tell him.

The notion steals his breath away, that a life could be lived like this. He recalls gilded birdflight in the dying sun. Yes, Bhujerba is too high even for them. But Humes have wings too, and he just may know where to get some.

Ffamran lets the idea sit as a seed in his gut, and he waters it with another half-bottle of Madhu, one he does not bother to savor this time around.

\---

Ffamran learns the hard way that Bhujerba's infamous altitude makes him a very cheap date, and soon he's drunk as a sot over the bar, grinning a coeurl’s grin at some man a good decade over his age.

"Though I've had my taste of Bhujerban Madhu before," Ffamran begins in what is absolutely not a stumbling slur, "I've yet to have my fill of a Bhujerban man." The words fall from his tongue far too easily but the liquor and thin air have made it all too fun to hold it.

Through the glaze of his eyes, Ffamran sees the man smile, almost sweetly. "There's something in your hair, Bhadra," he offers, and the company around him laughs - at him. Unfamiliar, that. He does not like it one bit.

Ffamran brings his hands to sift through the locks, still dulled in sheen with the wake of gunpowder and mine dust, and with abject horror he peels off a small fleck of what must be rotted flesh before he flits it to the ground.

The laughter follows him out into the streets, and Ffamran stomps to the inn and runs the tap hot until his scalp burns.

\---

_“The YPA’s 5ZT’s precise origins long stood uncertain before coming to an ugly light. The story goes that it was built from drawings stolen from Sir Julian Gresley of Archadia about 604 O.V. by an anonymous engineer-turned-thief who held a grudge against him. The thief’s spy, however, blundered and took the wrong blueprints; they were intended to be for an exclusive and promising new experimental aircraft, but ended up being a stale prototype for the “KRWN” models Gresley was designing at the time to join the already-successful “ORDLA” & “BNCR” ships. The engineer-thief realized his spy’s mistake too late and the 5ZT was built, with many resulting flaws and a superficial likeness to Gresley's “KRWN” models.” _

Ffamran chuckles to the dead air of his bedchambers. The YPA has come a long way now, if it once sold out to the ilk of thieves and spies. And poor ones, at that! Hard to believe it managed to redeem itself from that little mishap. He wonders how much gil that old anecdote cost to be swept under the rug.

Stretched along his coverlet on his stomach, Ffamran takes another bite of his Bhujerban chocolate; it’s a hunk meant to be shaved down for baking, probably, but he cannot stave off the impulse to eat it like an apple. He lets it melt on his tongue as he flits through **YPA’s Rise, Fall, and Rebirth: 550-650 O.V.** , a book he picked up on a whim that, admittedly, proves to be extremely entertaining.

The Archadian’s hair, tied in a loose ponytail, sits at his spine and wayward strands fall forward to frame each cheekbone. He tucks a stray lock behind his ear and distracts himself further when he feels where the new piercing sits, smugness lining his lips; he’s liking it more and more, the accessory. It was but a last-minute decision before his return flight from Bhujerba. A bit simple for his tastes now - a mere thin hoop hugging the cartilage - but he has his eye on a jeweler, some eccentric immigrant from Giza, to commission when it heals.

Piercings above the lobe are a faux-pas among the gentry; they’d call him a bangaa and offer him a blindfold if they saw what he’d done, but it’s nothing a little hair won’t cover. And he has enough of that. And well, _he_ thinks it looks rather becoming, and what else matters, really?

In fact, he’s not entirely opposed to getting a few more, but that’s for a later time.

There are footsteps outside his door, and Ffamran is thrown from his reverie. In haste he undoes the tie around his hair and the tresses fall forward to shield him like a curtain.  As usual, the door opens without a knock.

Cid smiles from the doorframe, without teeth, and Ffamran wears his best moue of distaste only a bratling of his tier could muster. “Would you find it within yourself to have the decency to knock?”

“The knighting ceremony is only days away,” Cid begins with zero regard to the fact his son has spoken at all, and Ffamran drops his book onto the bed with a muted thump. “Do try to keep that well-groomed little head of yours out of trouble, mind.”

Ffamran rolls his eyes. “Trouble is subjective; I for one had a grand time,” he counters, sighing to the ceiling - and truly he can’t remember the last time he had such fun, that close to the sky, that deep within it.

Cid only laughs.

“You’ll make a fine Judge, Ffamran, once you purge this little bout of adolescent deviancy having recently possessed you.”

The Humbaba in the room is too big to not acknowledge, and Ffamran snaps at him in disgust.

“Talking about possession now, are we?” He locks eyes with his father, summoning the sharpest glare Archadia has forged within him, but it does nothing to sway the veil of amusement on the scientist’s features, ever nonplussed, “Not _only_ do I wish to know what possessed you to think I’d ever desire such a fate, I’d also revel in knowing what has, quite literally, possessed you since your journey to Jagd that earned you a _suspension_.”

“Vayne has sent a pardon on my suspension - he works quick, that man!” Cid laughs knowingly as though there is a joke here that Ffamran does not know of. “Ne’er you worry, Ffamran, we’ll still have bread on the table yet, though you would do well to stop biting the hand that feeds it to you.”

The silence between them is taut and the taste of chocolate lingering in Ffamran’s mouth echoes something sour.

“You have one week,” Cid adds cheekily, a lilt to his voice, and he leaves without shutting the door.

Ffamran looks down at his book for a long, long moment, before the fall of his hair covers the paragraph he was reading; irritably he tosses it behind his shoulder.

One week is enough time.

\---

Anywhere in the upper echelons of Archades, one would be hard-pressed to find a pair of clippers; only if a man were joining the lower ranks of the military would he be given a cut so short, and even then, that was not done - never done - in a salon, of all places.

But Ffamran finds a way after some sleuthing, and when his father spends yet another night in Draklor, Ffamran has all the time in the world to shed this skin that brands his very blood.

He stares into his stoic reflection, hollowed ghosts of lines hinted beneath his eyes, and takes one last good look at his noble visage. The line of his thin mouth is straight and firm and as he holds his gaze with the mirror he discovers, suddenly, that he’s tired of his stale image. His hair hangs beautifully even in the harsh light of his bath chamber and Ffamran brings the parted shears up to an anonymous clump of tresses. The straight angle of the blades, open and hungry, gleams against it and he freezes; his fingers curl around the shear’s rings as though they were triggers begging to be pulled.

He takes one more breath before tightening the curl of his grip. The sound as it cleaves through hair is quiet and beautiful, a _snap,_ rife with finality. Strands flutter to the floor to curl upon the tile like a felled snake. The motion proves therapeutic, and soon more hair rains to the floor as Ffamran gives himself a chop, one to which Archades holds no merit.

\---

When he guesses he’s made enough of a right mess, Ffamran looks at his butchered hair and wants to laugh. He’s never looked so unsightly. Mismatched clumps jut here and there and he resembles a freshly hatched chocobo with wayward tufts fluffed about his head.

The job isn’t done yet.

The clippers sit on the edge of the sink, quiet and waiting; he's never used one of these in his life and he would do well to not slit a gash in his scalp. He eyes it warily, and it comes to life in his hands with a flick of the switch. There’s some small number etched onto the random attachment he chose to equip it with - it matters not how short he goes as long as he gets it done right.

Ffamran follows a path on the curve of his head once, twice, three times until he feels the blades whir and slice something satisfactory. Once he learns the pressure and angle alike, it is simple, and he watches the remaining hair fall from him like rain. With each steady arc passing over his head, Ffamran feels a touch older, until the reflection framed by his gilded mirror is no longer that of a nobleman.

It likens more to a wanted poster.

The thought makes him laugh again and Ffamran rubs at the soft bite of his new cut. He drops the clippers into the sink and steps out onto his veranda, and feels the night air touch him in ways it never has.

\---

Cid, maddeningly enough, makes no move to notice his son is more or less scalped when he passes by him next. His eyes are distant and clouded, as though he looks but does not see, and Ffamran is held by a cold incredulous fury as hard as steel.

It should come as no surprise to him, really, he mulls later. Unless he unearthed that nethicite was growing beneath his hair the entire time, it would make sense Cid would show no interest.

 

By the time it grows into something suitable, he’s already skybound; a man with no name and a ship no different.

  
  
  



End file.
